With the advent of the Internet, many businesses have focused their marketing to reach customers on the Internet. Online advertising includes displaying banners and other advertisements at search engines and other web sites. When a user accesses a web site or runs a search on the search engine using keywords associated with the advertiser's product or service, a corresponding advertisement is displayed on the user's personal computer.
Presently, advertising is generally allocated by an advertiser or third party acting on the behalf of an advertiser who, looking at demographic data and usage traffic, determines the websites with which the advertisements would be associated. In such conventional models, users' usage patterns implicitly or indirectly guide advertising resource allocation. Users do not directly guide advertising resource allocation because advertisers still need to obtain traffic data, interpret it, and determine what, in theory, is the best way to reach out to target users. Therefore, advertisers are not able to obtain feedback from users, which may be especially valuable for the set of users who are loyal to the advertiser's brand of product or service.
Recent attempts at involving users in advertising include methods of interactive advertising, which involve use of interactive media (mainly internet) to communicate with consumers and to promote products, brands, and services. Such methods, however, do not involve the users in the decision making process regarding where the advertisements are to be published. The decision of selecting appropriate websites for publication of advertisements (interactive or otherwise) is still based on assumptions derived from usage statistics such as the number of hits a website receives. These assumptions cause the advertiser to lose out on dedicated groups of users, who may not be large in numbers, but are significant due to their loyalty for a particular kind of content.
It is therefore desirable to have an arrangement which enables advertisers to have their customers, patrons, or users directly participate in advertising resource allocation decisions. Further, it is also desirable to have a system that can be configured to place greater weight on the decisions or input of more valuable users, such as those who are loyal to the advertisers' brands.
It is also desirable to have a system in which a user can announce to third parties, including followers of the user, as to where the user is navigating, thereby enabling third parties to follow and track the user as he or she navigates.